Description
Book SynopsisA Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explorehowgirls coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of feeling queer or different from the norm. These material testimonies show how a forgotten audience engenderedterminologies, communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Girl, Fan, Queer: Female Film Reception in the 1910s
1. It Disquiets, It Delights: Same-Sex Attachments and Early Female Moviegoing
2. “Dear Flo”: Homoerotic Desire and Queer Identification in Private Fan Mail
3. “If I Were a Man”: Gender-Bending in Girls’ Published Fan Poems
4. Girls, Pick Up Your Scissors: The Queer Makings of the “Movie Scrap Book” Fad
5. Different from Others: Movie-Illustrated Diaries, Cross-Dressing, and Circulated
Discourses on Female Deviance
6. A Coding of Queer Delights: Gender Nonconformity in Girls’ Movie Scrapbooks
Epilogue: One of Us: The Corporatization of Female Fan Love and Labor
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
